Robin Rice Essays

New Zealand native Ruth
Allen studied glass in Australia. She has worked in countries around the
world and returned to New Zealand for five years to run a hot glass studio,
Gloria, with business partner Vivian Bell. Her first Resident Fellowship at
the Creative Glass Center of America was in 1994 and her second in Fall,
2005. Wherever she is, she feels the influence of her homeland remains
“second nature to me. We’re an island nation and if I’m not close to the
ocean or surrounded by water in some capacity, I’m disturbed. And I don’t
want to look at it if I can’t get in it. I’ve been swimming all my life.
Swimming is my device to become calm; It’s just like food to me.”

A palpable sense of
environment is also at the center of Allen’s thoughts about glass right now:
a sense of color and light and fluidity. Beyond this, she wants to create
environments that are healing or comforting. “I’m working with a lot of
color. Color is quite a powerful tool to create mood.” She places pieces of
color on walls, in order to consider the effect and is moving toward the use
of colored light. “Skin absorbs light and that is why in history the
Egyptians and prehistoric civilizations used sunlight chambers for medicinal
purposes. The idea is that light is a healing source. By using colored
light, I believe I can manipulate people in a healing way.”

Color and light are common
devices to influence people in specific environments. Allen says, “Color is
used in jails. Blue quiets aggression. It’s all relevant to the [individual]
as well. If you’re brought up in a violent or angry domestic situation, then
red, a color of anger, is a soothing color.”

She envisions an even more
sophisticated use of color to heal the psyche. She begins with insights
based on personal experience. “Every human being encounters a situation that
is difficult to cope with. I became really depressed because of some life
situation and I found it difficult to move through it. I was blowing glass
at the time. I started making blue pebbles with lights inside them.” Setting
the lights on timers, she organized the pebbles into an environment that was
“fluid and soothing.” She soon found that sitting in this space for extended
periods of time was helpful to her.

Allen hopes she can use this
evolving understanding “maybe for people who are sick, maybe terminally ill,
to have a space where people can go and sit and be quiet and be comforted,
that becomes a patient’s nest. If colored light has the potential to change
feelings, you never know, it may have more healing properties.”

In addition to a degree from
Canberra School of Art and a degree in community cultural development, Allen
is currently earning a Master of Fine Arts through research at Monash
University, Melbourne, Victoria. Currently, she says she is developing
“a space in the hospital which works with the mind and with light. It’s a
long term project because I have to do a lot of research to actualize
it, but at this time it’s very vibrant and buoyant.”

Allen has studied poets and
artists who use space and light, from the triangular yellow room by Bruce
Nauman to the geodesic domes of architect Buckminster Fuller to subtle light
works by James Turrell. She was also influenced by working with now CGCA
Artistic Director Hank Adams at Pilchuck in 1993 and shares his interest in
“community and sustainability and the synergetic nature of process and
material.”

At CGCA, she concentrated on
making modules of pulled glass, angular open and irregular lacy frameworks,
which are intended to cast complex shadows. Scale is an issue because as she
adds new cells or “rings” to the piece, the completed part cools and
repeated reheating can be too much. “I am working with gravity, leverage,
heat, and constructing these things in such a way that the piece speaks for
itself. The process lends itself to this form. This is a little bit of a
physics equation. I can start with a foundation of only six rings. As I am
pulling the rings, I am only really considering the aesthetics, but I
have to be careful how I manipulate them because I don’t want to weaken the
forms. The piece captures a moment in time. I am calling them ‘Synergetics’
because no part of the piece can exist without the other parts.”

These pieces, though, are
destined to be components of a large post-CGCA environmental work in which
projected light will cast shadows. “The big picture comes later,” Allen
concludes.

Funding has been made possible in part by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey Cultural Trust. WheatonArts receives general operating support from the New Jersey Historical Commission, Division of Cultural Affairs in the New Jersey Department of State, and is supported in part by the New Jersey Department of State, Division of Travel and Tourism and Cumberland County Urban Enterprise Zone.

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